


with bloody feet

by paperclipbitch



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Alternate Universe - Canon, Community: dark_bingo, Gen, casually murdery btw, so hey i ship red/jefferson oops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-27
Updated: 2012-08-27
Packaged: 2017-11-13 01:15:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/497764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fairytale world!AU. <i>She knows that in a lot of ways the money is just an excuse.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	with bloody feet

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from _Howl_ by Florence  & the Machine because it had to be, didn’t it.] So apparently I ship these two? I quite like this show, but when I went looking for fic about Red there was hardly any, and apparently I want to fix that. Hiiiii, Red. Also Jefferson is great because he’s psycho and also Sebastian Stan. Done for my wild card ( _fall from grace_ ) for dark_bingo. Buggered about with the canon of both characters in order to make this work, but it’s pretty similar to the flashbacks you see on the show.

They say that there are _things_ in the Forest.

Red observes this, tugging her distinctive hood over her hair, feet silent on the leaves. 

Jefferson laughs, sharp, bitter, cracking in the middle. “There’s _us_ ,” he tells her.

Well, that’s a truth of a different kind, isn’t it.

.

Snow disapproves, because Snow always disapproves, nibbling one perfect ruby lip and avoiding Red’s gaze. She looks sadder each time Red sees her, and she would fix things if only she knew how, if only Snow would _ask_ , free of charge. Best friends don’t have to pay for murder, after all. 

“He’s...” She hesitates, twisting her fingers together, black hair curling against the soft white of her cloak. Snow is tough, Snow is brave, Snow doesn’t deserve any of this. Snow deserves her true love and babies and safe stone walls with doors that lock at night to keep the wolves out. “What do you _know_ about him, Red?”

What _does_ Red know about Jefferson? That his daughter is missing or dead, if she ever existed to begin with, that he had a wife who is probably dead, that he wears a battered hat that may or may not be magical, that he likes scissors. That his smile has an unhealthy quirk in the corner and his fingers cannot ever stay still and he isn’t afraid of Red; he’s maybe the only person who isn’t afraid of Red.

“Enough,” she promises Snow, leaning forward to press her hands over Snow’s, keep them still. “I trust him.”

“With your life?” Snow asks, arching a sceptical brow, and, well, Red sometimes wonders if she’ll wake up with his scissor blades in her jugular too. 

“With my cloak,” she responds.

Snow swallows, and nods, and doesn’t push further.

.

They live in a little house in the Forest and eat a lot of mushrooms and stay away from people: Jefferson from preference, Red from necessity. This was a home, once, and wasn’t built for lonely, angry people to chafe against each other, but it’s all Jefferson has left and Red’s slept under the stars and it’s overrated. They light fires and drink sour tea and talk about nothing and Red smiles a lot and Jefferson, hardly ever.

She writes to her grandmother and promises that she’s alright, that things are going well. She’d send some of the money with the notes, if she thought it would ever actually see Granny. 

They have more money than their lifestyle requires, more money than Red can think what to do with, but she knows that in a lot of ways the money is just an excuse. Neither of them _really_ need a reason to do what they do, although that’s something she tries not to think about, something she will never tell Snow.

.

Red squirms under the cape, soft against her bare skin, sticks and dry leaves crackling under her spine. Changes always leave her disorientated, never sure if she should be speaking or snarling, the taste of blood in her mouth, slick over her teeth.

She wriggles until she can poke her head out of the cape, see her surroundings. Jefferson is squatting on the ground in front of her, smile unnerving, arterial spray splashed across his face. His eyes are glittering in the moonlight, everything frosted with silver. “Welcome back,” he says.

Red rakes her claws – _hands_ – over the ground, getting mud beneath the nails, and sees the body behind him. What’s left of it, anyway, scraps of skin and muscle and bone and blood everywhere, and Red thinks vaguely _I did that_ and it doesn’t scare her like it used to.

“Good job,” Jefferson adds, pushing himself upright and offering Red a hand to her feet. She shakes a little once she’s upright, pressing dirty fingers to her bloody face, still feeling half-wild, barely human. Jefferson doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even look at her; his gaze is on the corpse, coolly analytical. 

She runs her tongue over her teeth, checking for shreds of clothes or worse, salty metallic blood swishing around her mouth, so familiar it no longer disconcerts her. “Did you bring a handkerchief?” she asks.

Jefferson hands one over without bothering to look at her; Red clutches the cloth tight, smudging it between her fingers while she follows him home, bare feet silent on the Forest floor.

.

She met Jefferson her third week of living in the Forest, running away from hunters and possible victims and the truth. Running away from herself. She was dirty and torn and tired, the cloak miraculously undamaged and glimmering like it had a plan of its own, and when she closed her eyes at night she remembered Peter, what was left of Peter, his bones cracking between her jaws. 

He had messy hair that fell into his eyes and a mean expression and he didn’t pity her the way the few travellers she’d run into had. He just watched her with narrowed thoughtful eyes, playing a pair of scissors between his fingers. 

“Are you going to kill me?” she asked, sprawled out beneath a tree in her cloak and her ruined dress, black hair and bloodied fingers and clean out of hope.

“No one’s paid me to,” he replied, offhand, and that shouldn’t have been reassuring but it was. 

She let him keep walking, watched him out of sight, but his scent stayed on the wind and the wolf didn’t forget.

.

Sometimes, in the dead of night, while Jefferson twitches in nightmares and the fire burns low, Red hugs her knees and stares into the darkness and wonders if she somehow _asked_ for this.

.

“You’re running from your prince, Snow,” Red points out, licking blackberries from her fingertips. They’re scratched and stained purple now, but it’s worth it. “You’re running from your prince and your stepmother and you _can_ , if you stay here long enough.” She sighs. “I can’t run, because my problems won’t leave.”

Snow sighs; her lips are coloured with berry juice, her hair has leaves in it, and her gown is a little muddy at the hem. She still looks like a princess, but a softer one, an approachable one. She’s Red’s only friend, and Red wants so badly for her to understand, but she’s not sure that she ever will. She won’t leave, though, and that sometimes feels like enough.

“You rob the rich,” Red points out after a while, berry juice running down her chin. 

“You kill people,” Snow counters.

“Possibly bad people?” Red suggests. She cared, at first. She somehow doesn’t anymore. “Someone wants them dead, so they’ve done _something_.”

“Regina wants me dead,” Snow reminds her. 

Red closes her eyes, tips her head back. The wolf doesn’t discriminate, and a lot of the time she doesn’t remember. The job is done, and then there is money, and she doesn’t starve, and it keeps her busy.

“Would you?” Snow asks, after a while. Her voice is soft, and Red doesn’t need to ask for clarification.

“Of course not,” she replies. “Never. _Never_ , Snow.”

The silence lingers. “Would Jefferson?”

Red swallows. “Probably.”

She can’t promise that she could control him; she can’t. She can’t even promise that she can control herself, when the moon is full and the cloak just slips from her shoulders.

Snow doesn’t push it, but her smile is forgiving. 

Red _hates_ her sometimes.

.

She finds traces of the little girl in the house; dolls brushed into boxes, forgotten flowers pressed between pages of books, a pair of tiny shoes in the back of a cupboard that have lain there a long time. 

“What did you do?” she asks one night, Jefferson washing his arms and face clean in a bowl of cold water, alternating splashes with mouthfuls of cheap spirits. She’s clean already, though her skin still feels like fur in the dim candlelight and she’s sipping tea to try and clear her mouth of the taste of death.

He freezes, water droplets catching on his chin, his cheeks, and after a while, he says: “something terrible.”

Jefferson’s eyes flash like his scissor blades when he turns to look at her, shadows spilling over his features, mouth twisting. “What did _you_ do?”

Red is tired, and she wants to sleep. Sometimes she wants to hibernate, sometimes she doesn’t want to wake up at all. 

He doesn’t blink, and she shrugs under his full attention. “Something worse,” she replies.

.

They live in the Forest, and people tell stories that may or may not be about them but which sound like the ones her grandmother told her to keep her inside on winter nights. The stories may have been true, but the reasons behind them were a well-intentioned lie. 

“We’ve become a bedtime story,” she tells Jefferson. 

She wonders if he told stories to the child who isn’t here now. She’ll never ask. She doesn’t want to know the answer, after all. 

There are mumbles of wolves with teeth like blades, of a man with eyes like a wolf’s, of murder and mayhem and punishment. She relates these, sprawled against the worn sheets, and he laughs his shattered laugh for her.

“None of them are important enough to kill anyway,” he remarks.

That might not have been the answer she was looking for, but Red doesn’t know what she was really asking, if she was asking anything at all, so she nods and pulls the worn woollen blanket over her head and falls asleep listening to him humming to himself. Madness or a lullaby; it sounds a lot like both.

.

She could go home, back to her grandmother, to her village and her house, wear her cloak at night and sleep like she always did. Marry a baker, maybe, have children and a soft flat life, never think about these messy grieving days of fear and exhaustion and murder.

She could _do_ it, you know.

Except that there’s no home, not now, not with Peter gone, and she misses her grandmother but not a lot else.

This can’t last forever, but it will do for the moment, and maybe that’s all she can ask for.

.

“One day,” Red murmurs to the lining of her cloak, “one day I’ll eat you before you can wrap me up.”

“And I’ll thank you for it,” Jefferson responds dryly.

She pulls the cape from her face, looking up at the stars and the white blank eye of the moon. It’s quiet, too quiet; animals are afraid of the wolf and they run away on these nights. There’s nothing but the sky and the branches shivering in a scarce breeze, and Jefferson sitting on the ground beside her with shadows instead of an expression.

Gently, like he thinks she’s going to turn her head and bite – and maybe she will, after all – Jefferson dabs a handkerchief around Red’s mouth, wiping it clean. She stays still and watches his lips press in concentration, moonlight catching on his eyelashes. 

It could be romantic, except that nothing is romantic anymore, because Red isn’t a child and because a boy gave her his heart once and she ate it.

“I’m naked,” she says, and then can’t stop herself from laughing because it sounds so ridiculous and childish, mud smeared over her limbs and leaves in her hair and she has no idea what she’s doing.

“You always are,” he reminds her, but it’s soft, amused, and Red rolls her eyes and stays where she is for a little longer.

.

“I don’t like him,” Snow admits, but her tone is resigned, accepting.

“You don’t like most aspects of my life,” Red reminds her. “I’m the villain now, the bad guy, whatever we called it in the stories.”

Snow raises an eyebrow at her and they both giggle, both of them drowning in the world and too much truth and the price you pay for it, but the sun is shining and the past hasn’t caught them up yet and Red likes days like these.

“You’re not...” Snow sighs. “I don’t know what you are.”

“I’m the Big Bad Wolf,” Ruby reminds her with her hands on her hips, tossing her head.

That much will always be true.

“And what is Jefferson?” Snow asks.

Red shrugs. “He’s part of a different story altogether,” she says. 

Snow looks thoughtful, kicking her feet through the leaves and pine needles on the floor.

“Your story’s different too,” Red reminds her. “And it’ll end better than mine.”

“Don’t say that,” Snow says, quick and hard, almost like snapping. 

Red doesn’t know what it is to love someone and to know that they are out there and alive and you cannot have them. Not like this, not on a grand scale that sounds too fantastical to ever be real. Her love story was smaller in scale, and she always thought that was what it would be; no one told her it would turn into a tragedy until she found out the hard way. Now, she has Jefferson and his ever-increasing madness, and the taste of blood on her teeth, and Snow’s sad eyes when their paths cross again.

“Alright,” Red concedes, but she crosses her fingers where Snow can’t see.

.

The sun is setting, and Jefferson sits by the window, winding a scrap of ribbon around and around his fingers. Red watches him over her tea, curling her bare toes against the rug, and thinks about him living here happy and smiling and whole, thinks about love and the cost of keeping it.

Maybe one day, when people talk about them, they’ll have both halves of the truth and all this will make more sense with hindsight. 

For now, she’s happy being a warning, a legend, a spectre of glinting teeth in the dark. It’s easier, somehow, to be something that isn’t quite real.

“Are you ready?” Jefferson asks without looking up, ribbon twisting over and over and over in his shaking hands.

Red says nothing, but behind her teacup she smiles.


End file.
